The History of the Church is a vital part of the Orthodox Christian faith. Orthodox Christians are defined significantly by their continuity with all those who have gone before, those who first received and preached the truth of Jesus Christ to the world, those who helped to formulate the expression and worship of our faith, and those who continue to move forward in the unchanging yet ever-dynamic Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church.

1510 Russian monk Philotheus of Pskov proclaims in a panegyric letter to the Grand Prince of Moscow that "Two Romes have fallen, The third stands, And there will be no fourth,", identifying the Third Rome with Russia.

1512 First Christian church erected in Americas in Santo Domingo by Spanish.

1516 Desiderius Erasmus publishes "Textus Receptus" of New Testament on the basis of six late manuscripts of the Byzantine text-type.

1537-41 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilds the city walls of Jerusalem (the current walls of the Old City of Jerusalem), including sealing off the Golden Gate in 1541 to prevent the Messiah's entrance.

1540 Death of Emperor Lebna Dengel of Ethiopia; formal founding of Jesuits.

1573 Pope Gregory XIII establishes Congregation for the Greeks, a committee of cardinals who addressed issues relating to the Greeks in southern Italy and Sicily in the hope of resolving tensions between Greeks and Latins.

1596 Union of Brest-Litovsk, several million Ukrainian and Byelorussian Orthodox Christians, living under Polish rule, leave the Church of Constantinople and recognize the Pope of Rome, without giving up their Byzantine liturgy and customs, creating the Uniate church.

1652 School and hospital established in Old Cairo by Patr. Joannikios.

1652-1658 Patriarch Nikon of Moscow revises liturgical books to bring them into conformity with the Greek liturgical customs, leading to mass excommunication and schism of dissenters, who become known as Old Believers.

1672 Synod of Jerusalem convened by Patr. Dositheos Notaras, refuting article by article the Calvinistic confession of Cyril Lucaris, defining Orthodoxy relative to Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and defining the Orthodox Biblical canon; acts of this council are later signed by all five patriarchates (including Russia).

1689 Great Serb Migrations of hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees from Kosovo and Serbia proper, leaving a vacuum filled by flood of Albanian immigrants.

1698 Consecration of the first Orthodox Church in China, in the name of Sophia (Divine Wisdom), when Emperor Kangxi ordered a Buddhist temple to be cleared for Russian inhabitants in Beijing.

1700 The Creation Era calendar in Russia, in use since AD 988 was changed to the Julian Calendar by Peter the Great; Peter the Great published an Ukase on June 18th that made a resounding appeal for the propagation of the faith in Siberia and China.

1700-02 Submission of the dioceses of Lemberg (Lviv) and Luzk (Lutsk) in the Galician area of Ukraine to Roman Catholic Church completes Union of Brest-Litovsk, so that two-thirds of the Orthodox in western Ukraine had become Greek Catholic.

1707-20 Grabbe's edition of the Septuagint published at Oxford, reproducing (imperfectly) the Codex Alexandrinus of London.

Notes

Some of these dates are necessarily a bit vague, as records for some periods are particularly difficult to piece together accurately.

The division of Church History into separate eras as done here will always be to some extent arbitrary, though it was attempted to group periods according to major watershed events.

This timeline is necessarily biased toward the history of the Orthodox Church, though a number of non-Orthodox or purely political events are mentioned for their importance in history related to Orthodoxy or for reference.